Stepping Forward and Back

On the positive side, we have pushed a number of fixes and improvements into production recently. One is that we have added a new “Add New Project” button to the Explore Projects page and changed the link at at the bottom of the page to a button as well so that it is much easier to see where one can add new projects to the Open Hub. We have also fixed an issue that arose when trying to import really big GitHub repositories.

We made important fixes to the Fetch, Import and Sloc job processes to that the back end systems so that the system is more accurately detecting when repositories need to be updated and scheduling jobs for those. We fixed the internal tracking issue so that the way low-level jobs report their work and update their status is correct and more consistent. We also addressed some small UI issues where the correct and full text was not included in a tool tip when claiming new positions and some other UI tweaks.

On the less positive side, we found additional complications with our new back end infrastructure. In short, there are issues with the file system behind the NFS mount point where we store our repositories that is blocking a number of jobs from being able to run. It looks like many of the major projects — such as Mozilla Firefox, MySQL, Apache HTTP, etc. — cannot be updated. Nor can we update these projects until the issue is resolved. One current plan is to replace the NFS Server and reformat the disk with our repository data. Obviously, that would mean a major loss of data.

However, due to the limitations of the file system, we have an unknown number of repositories that are already generating bad analysis because of data loss. In essence, we’ve already been impacted by that risk and therefore we have to find a way to get a suitable NFS mount point and start refetching all the repositories. We’ll do our best to keep everyone informed.

About Peter Degen-Portnoy

Mars-One Round 3 Candidate. Engineer on the Open Hub development team at Black Duck Software. Family man, athlete, inventor